Of course RBS are not the only bank to play ‘catch us with our pants down if you can’ as Barclays Bank have played a similar hand with respect to their 10% increase in bonuses worth over £2bn and announcing cuts to over 7000 jobs, presumably due to technological unemployment. This the same Barclays Bank who were complicit in the libor scandal, the fixing of interest rates, and also recipient of tax payer money to soften the blow of the economic meltdown of 2008.
The mainstream media are playing tacit dismay at these announcements, with only opinion pieces by people such as Owen Jones offering any real insight into the daylight robbery and daily economic terrorism being waged on we the people. The social media of course is full of it but that is information that you have to actively search for and not receive as part of your regular, daily spoon fed government message. Who really has the time or energy for that after 10-11 hours of being a debt slave?

Whilst these banks and politicians continue to bleed us dry, everyday people are being assessed by Atos, the SS arm of the DWP at the behest of Iain Duncan-Smith, and having their social security slashed and/or withdrawn. These actions have resulted in many people who are sick and dying being told they are fit to work. You literally couldn’t make it up. Why is all this happening? Because in 2008 the world found out that major banking corporations had played a dodgy game of roulette with public money and when it came up black and not red, they lost it all. Instead of cutting them adrift as any one of us would have been if we gambled our savings at the casino, or as Iceland did with their banking ‘elites’, Gordon Brown bailed them out with our money leaving us to pay for it. David Cameron and his side man Nick Clegg continue to make us pay for it, with some of us paying the ultimate price for this ideological austerity with their very lives.

What can we do to challenge and change what is happening?

Well firstly we have to become informed; this means not relying on the prescribed daily dose of hate given at specific daily intervals from the mainstream media, it means using the wonderful tool that is the Internet to find out more about the world immediately around us and the wider world too. We are all connected.

We have to question what we find; just as we should not blithely listen to and believe what the mainstream media tells us, we should be mindful of the information we find on the Internet. Cross referencing sources and claims is a must in a world full of disinformation, don’t believe me, look for yourself.

We have to share information – knowledge is power; but power to do what? The success of life and the evolution of species is hinges on co-operation, by communities working together to adapt, improvise and overcome. It is not about the survival of the fittest. That is not to say I am calling for a Tory-esque ‘big society’ but for us to use the tools at our disposal, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc to share information and not just cute pictures of cats and dogs (that’s not to say you shouldn’t as without enjoying life what is the point in fighting for a better one?) Oh and don’t forget the power of the old-fashioned word of mouth.

Get out there; as in once you have taken the first steps in finding and sharing information, you need to act on it. That might mean taking an hour or two out of your weekend to go to a rally, march or candle light vigil but it is an essential part of the process in making change, to get people together peacefully on the streets at events. You can and will meet some of the most varied and interesting people you will ever come across at events like this and it is where ideas start to grow.

Connect the dots – we’re in this together; as in once you have taken the steps to attend an event for something close to your heart look for the next one on a different topic. Joining each others causes is important, we have to build networks across the different campaigns being run from stop the war to save the NHS.

Take stock of your history; we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, nothing has ever been given to us, it has all been fought for over the centuries by people collectively and not won by individuals. The Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s was not Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, it was the collective will and actions of the people who helped to bring about change and gave these individuals a platform from which to speak and act.

Finally, believe in yourself; Collective and peaceful civil disobedience is a powerful tool when used in conjunction with mass economic withdrawal. None of these ideas are new and have been suggested in the past by the likes of Martin Luther King and Ghandi. What we have to do is believe that we can make change and we have to be daring enough to do so.

The biggest threat to our way of life is not the government or the terrorists they claim to be chasing across the globe. Its is our apathy.

The Royal Mail, educational system, NHS and emergency services have been built by the blood, sweat and tears of you and you grandparents going back 100 years. Today they are seen as cash cows for corrupt politicians and their privateer friends to siphon off billions in public money to line their private pockets and they are using the veil of austerity to do so. They have managed, somewhat convincingly, to persuade a large section of society that austerity is both real and necessary.

Worryingly this agenda is something that is pursued by both Labour and Conservatives, one hard and fast and the other a kind of “I can’t believe it’s not austerity”, or “austerity-lite” approach. Either way the end result is the same. Working people are forced to bear the brunt of paying for a crisis created by corrupt politicians, rogue bankers and immoral (if not illegal) banking practices with their banking and economic terrorism.

The leaders of both these parties are no longer interested in popularity contests at election time because there are common themes, goals and aims amongst them. They are ultimately all gorging themselves at the same trough of public money and broadly speaking, their sole interest is themselves.

The NHS as I mentioned is already paid for by our parents and grandparents, the problem we have is that far too few of us dare old enough to remember a time when you would have to pay for a doctor call out and all the associated care that goes with it and even less have stopped to think about the danger we face because of privatisation. Some may think that they will see no real problem because they already have some form of private medical care, paid for either by their employer or privately but the key point here is that these private firms are backed up by the publicly funded NHS. Even the Royal spawn, despite all its top private care, was delivered in a private hospital, ably supported by the resources of the NHS should anything have gone wrong.

Where will the support network be once the entire lot has been sold of to the great bearded one, Richard Branson?

In the case of the NHS the politicians have gone to great lengths to show us how badly the NHS is failing and have been duly assisted by a complicit media, none more so than our publicly funded BBC who reel off story after story about “nurses on safari” looking for patients or failing trusts. As bad as some of these stories may be on the face of it, these are an infinitesimally small percentage of the millions of people treated by wonderful doctors and nurses every day of the year, any time we call on them.

Where are our survivor stories?

Along with the horrors show run by the mainstream media, the government also repeatedly tell us that the immigrants (who are not even here yet) are to blame for the failure and over capacity of our A&E departments etc. These are blatant lies, used to prey on people’s fears and prejudice that is manufactured by a corrupt elite intent on walking away with billions in profit at the cost of our health. The process to privatisation is a simple but effective one; first the government go through a period of defunding which creates an environment for failure, the failures are reported and the cost to make improvements is amplified and then the privateers swoop in with the answer to take an ever-increasing cost off of the tax payers hands. All the while feeding you distraction stories of immigrants, bad nurses and creating apathy to convince you that a nice guy like Branson will make a good job of it.

Really? He is a businessman about making money. Would you really want someone in charge of something that makes money solely off of the death and illness of people? The only way they will make profit is by charging us for treatments, reducing wages of the nurses providing the majority of the care (not the execs, they get paid off to push through change) and generally hanging us out to dry. See how cheap health insurance will be then when they know you cannot rely on the NHS. These firms will have cornered the market and will drive up prices. Just look at what the energy firms are preparing to do this winter, nearly 10% increase in price’s!

The apathy they are trying to foster enables them to impose these changes because we feel we cannot make a difference and that we cannot make a change. We have given up our power and we have to take it back. One person can make a difference and everyone should do so, if we do not start offering a resistance to these attacks now and come to realise we have more in common with each other than with these merciless privateers and criminals running the country, then we will quite literally be cut adrift and priced out of even a base level of living.

We can do this by winning the hearts and minds of the people around us, taking interest in each other’s causes and not waiting for people to come to us and ours, we can withdraw economically from certain corporations to redistribute the pain, we can write music, draw, sing and create art – the true way of protesting and engaging the hearts and minds of others. If we create ripples they can one day become tidal waves.

We inherited a world of opportunity from our parents, we have a duty to hand it on to the next generation in a better state and not sell it from under them for a dollar.